


Love of Samson

by HipericoLotus



Category: Game of Thrones (TV), The Walking Dead (TV), The Witcher (TV), Twin Peaks, Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Canonical Character Death, Character Death Fix, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Daemon Settling, Daemon Severance/Intercision, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, M/M, daemon AU, ireallydolovedandelionbuthaveasickwayofshowingit, motherofallfixits, nightkingtheon, offerstobetawillbeenthusiasticallyreceived, shesayshumbly, stealthish crossover, twforwordytags, yeahidefinitelyhavemyprioritiesstraight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-15 15:33:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 3,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29191593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HipericoLotus/pseuds/HipericoLotus
Summary: Eyes open fully, one pupil sparkling with cataract and bisected by a scar tearing down paper-thin tissue past the white, through the lashes, from eyebrow to cheekbone. They widen at the sight of Geralt then close again, energy apparently spent."Don't," Geralt murmurs, "No, don't, open your eyes. Please, please open your eyes or I'll hit you so hard they'll swell shut for a week. Jas. Jas! Jaskier, look, look up, see who's with me? You peacocking bastard, after all of your pushing, Jas, I found her, look at her. I found Pavetta's child, Jaskier.""I found my child."
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	1. 4

4.

_I have to go_

The strange man, decidedly less so now that he's not decomposing, jerks to a stop next to an astoundingly beautiful girl with tangled wet hair and volcanic sand scraped over her bare legs.

"Oh, Laura" in a whisper, followed by a cry: "Priest!"

Once he has Geralt's attention, he continues, "I need you to go sleep in a real bed while I raise one of these. Twelve hours at least. Pick someone now and they'll be ready when you wake. After breakfast you can find a peaceful place to bury Laura. In the shade, in something like twilight, far from any water. She won't want to come back."

To Laura, the man murmurs, “It was all you had, wasn’t it? The night.”

Us too, Ciri thinks.

The strangeman strokes the porcelain forehead and the girl's tense muscles lax like they're sighing, like life gave her one last exhalation before remaking her remains. The stranger moves his hand down Laura's face and keeps it level as it skims through the air over her torso and legs, stopping after he passes her toes. "What do you want to wear, sweet girl?" He pauses, then traces back through the air until his hand rests on her forehead again. She's clean now, dressed in an odd white gown that leaves shoulders and collarbones bare. How would it stay on, were she upright? Strangely stiff curls are piled high on her head under a jeweled crown. There’s a shadow, like something a nightingale might cast, drifting along the bodice of the dress.

"Geralt, can it be this one?" Ciri has lost interest in the dead princess, gaze drawn instead to a barrel-chested, wild-haired youth with curling dark lashes that remind her of Dara's.

"No, luned. Someone older, in case it goes badly. The charlatan needs to prove he can do it before we let him near us"

Luned. Like the use of full sentences, that's new. Is he just calling Ciri "girl"? He's always called her by her name. In rare instances, he'll say Rhena instead. She pauses, reaching for the second meaning of luned. Rhena, she knows, is "queen." Perhaps luned means princess. Or lioness. Lion cub, maybe. She hopes it means lioness.

During the entire exchange Geralt's eyes haven't left his not-friend's face, hands hovering over the mangled body, cataloguing injuries before the corpse stiffens. How can he see who Ciri is looking at, focused as he is on something else? The man is omniscient.


	2. 2

"Between these sheets of paper lies my truth" 

Eyes open fully, one pupil sparkling with cataract and bisected by a scar tearing down paper-thin tissue past the white, through the lashes, from eyebrow to cheekbone. They widen at the sight of Geralt then close again, energy apparently spent. 

"Don't," Geralt murmurs, "No, don't, open your eyes. Please, please open your eyes or I'll hit you so hard they'll swell shut for a week. Jas. Jas! Jaskier, look, look up, see who's with me? You peacocking bastard, after all of your pushing, Jas, I found her, look at her. I found Pavetta's child, Jaskier."

"I found my child."


	3. 5

_"Your hair was long when we first met…"_

It’s a young woman with flowing straight hair that in better lighting would be vibrantly red. She has the look of a mother; a mother by choice. One who loves the child and is loved by its father.

Ciri feels a sharp pain in her chest - the realization that her own mother looked like this in death. Tragic, cold... fulfilled.

Behind her, Geralt makes a noise of protest. “This isn’t what we agreed on.”

The strangeman opens his eyes anyway, and the woman opens hers.

She gasps. Warm tears somehow form in her clammy eyes, running down pale cheeks. Her jaw should be stiff, but it opens. Her face, too, is fluidly expressive, though her neck and body remain still.

“Where’s my baby?”

The syllables sound like nothing Ciri’s ever heard, but she understands them. She’d be surprised if they weren't emanating from the lips of a cadaver. She supposes one must triage shock.

The strangeman has his back to Ciri now, so she tries to imagine the look on his face. His tone is monotonous but his words are tender.

“Alive. Well. He looks just like his father. So does his son, but their personalities are all you. He’s suffered greatly. But then, so have you. He has a little girl too, the spitting image of her mother, but your boy recognized her laugh as soon as he heard it. She laughs like her granny."

"But he was a baby..."

"He's been blessed with memories and moments he has no right to. For them he gave up a great many things he did have a right to. He'll never regret the exchange."

A long silence follows. The stranger's hand moves. Is he wiping her tears?

“My husband?”

“He's not here. I can’t bring someone back without a body.”

“Demon?”

The man shakes his head slightly, then refocuses on the young mother.

“It’s in your son.”

She looks horrified for awhile, until her face changes to that of someone who’s just had a burst of insight.

“Where is yours?”

So he has emotions after all. He looks around, suddenly desperate, like he realizes, finally, what he’s missing. His voice shakes as he tells her she doesn’t have to decide yet. She nods and stills under his hands.

“Wait,” he says. “First, choose the next body. Someone elderly and maimed.”

The stranger lifts the limp form, holding her so she can look out over the corpses. She pauses, considering.

“That one.”


	4. 6

6

  
_Samson came back to bed, not much hair left on his head_

It’s a gentleman with a nappy silver halo. Despite the terrible wound that must have killed him, his expression is the very definition of serenity.

“Right,” sighs the strangeman, eyes still darting around the room. Chapped hands gently lay the young woman back down again before she stiffens. Something shimmers behind him; Ciri can feel Geralt notice it too. “A sheep-herding bookworm.”

He strokes the red hair once more and moves toward the old man.

“That’s not a bad injury,” Geralt says. He reaches for the cadaver he’s standing next to, silky white hair and pasty bearded face completely severed from the neck by a sharp sword in an inexpert hand. In the half-light it could almost be moving. “Raise this one.”

The stranger is suddenly between them, holding Geralt’s wrists, not only unafraid of the witcher but also distracted; how many men alive can say they’ve paid Geralt so little mind and survived?

“Don’t. You’ll release a terrible plague.” He cocks his head, exploring the corpse with his eyes. “Hm. I can’t decide if his killer was more like my second or my third.”

“Second or third what?” asks Ciri.

“Killer.”

So he was killed more than once?

“Who was the first?” Again, it's Ciri who asks. Geralt's mind has contained exactly one thought and no other since they broke down the terrible door, since he himself broke down.

The strangeman laughs - he is capable of laughter? - and looks straight at Geralt, who he’s released by now. “My priest.”


	5. 8

8.

_"He ate a slice of Wonderbread and went right back to bed"_

On their way to the next body there's a feral boy with bright red feathers tucked into his hair and armour. The stranger pauses next to him, perhaps noticing Ciri's interest.

To her astonishment, the thin dour face spreads and splits, crow's feet appearing around the eyes. It laughs. And laughs. And laughs. The damp curls bounce a little. Behind the strangeman, the whatever-it-was has migrated away from the corner of Ciri’s eyes to sit squarely by his hip, swirling and eddying but not quite taking shape. The more he laughs, the more solid it becomes.

“I don't need to ask this one,” he tells Ciri after the absurdity has gone on for far too long. “He's itching to come back, and a damn good asset he'd make.” He releases the boy's forehead. “I'll be back, little magpie. Soon you will be too.”


	6. 7

7\. 

_Not much hair left on his head_

After inquiring about a friend, the revived one chooses to wait. Before the pale lashes bow to rest on jacaranda cheekbones, he points to the decapitated body Geralt had been lobbying for.


	7. 0

0

_You are my sweetest downfall_

Storming a castle is a strange experience, especially when one knows what it is like to flee a castle under siege. Ciri, however, is well aware that the only innocents behind that moat are the prisoners who will die if she leaves now. Her godfather goes in front, of course, hard muscles flexing. His arms propel weapons that ought to be unwieldy with a deft grace that reminds her, for some unfathomable reason, of Calanthe bullying people with seafood forks. He manages it despite the uneven gait that on anyone else would be awkward. Geralt's health is incredible; Ciri has witnessed a couple of close calls in the last year and they've healed quickly and perfectly. Oddly, though, the leg wound her godfather had when the pair of them finally met comes back every now and then. Today of all days is very clearly a now or a then. No shades of grey, no alternative explanations. There is limping and bleeding. Geralt's eyes are shadowed - nightmares? Sleeplessness? Both? He is so very private. Once this is over, Ciri is strong-arming him to Nenneke.

Well. Famous last words.


	8. 1

1

  
_I loved you first_

The doors are impossibly heavy and reinforced with magic. The witcher is desperate now. Jaskier is nowhere to be found. Is he buried in the gardens? Dismembered in the catacombs? Was he never here at all?

The witcher is shaking, thigh bleeding freely, body pushed past limits he's forgotten since finding Ciri. He protects and protects and protects, receives protection (for she too is strong,) loses sight of the rules of exile he accumulated over the years. Didn't that start with Jaskier too? With the witcher's realization that he could choose to spend time with someone? Nenneke, his mother, even Roach and most of his contacts came into his life whether he wanted them or not.

Jaskier, who he half-hated in the beginning, was nonetheless the first he invited in.

He didn't mean to end things. Jaskier can nest anywhere, no matter how soon he must leave. He's folded himself into the witcher's solar plexus, inside the hole the witcher has wanted to spackle and paint over since childhood. Now the man is dead or dying, and the witcher would have dealings with every jinn on every plane if it meant he might go back to the bit about the fillingless pie and start over.

Ciri's scream blows the doors in, but she wisely waits until the witcher is in the room before crossing the threshold herself.

There, hanging on a cross, is Jaskier.

His breathing is laboured, eyes half-mast, pupils so blown they probably can't see a thing. The witcher can smell the lung infection from where he is standing. There are clean bandages between the legs, one of which ends in a blackened foot.

A creature, once a magician, is caught in the act of attaching a small blade of surgical steel to one of its right fingers, the rest of which already sport similar ones. Geralt is hurtling towards them but the monster is faster. The knives sink partway into Jaskier's chest - the one protruding from its middle finger is half an inch deep in the flesh below the solar plexus. The others are driven halfway through several ribs.

In one swing, Geralt severs each finger below the third joint and the head from the neck. He presses a shaking hand over the pinions to keep gravity from moving them inside. His other hand goes to Jaskier's face of its own volition and a voice he does not recognize keens the man's name.


	9. 3

3

_I have to go_

"Excuse you," sniffs Ciri, " _I_ found _you,_ stumbling around delirious. You couldn't have found your own arse, much less a child you'd never met. Right, Jaskier? Great brute that he is." 

She's speaking right into his ear, but the man barely stirs. 

"Jaskier," she's crooning now, changing tactics, "Sing for me? You sang for my parents, I've dreamt about your voice ever since I first heard Geralt speak your name. Please, please sing for me. Make me laugh, God knows I need it. There was a wonderful one, my grandmother said, a bawdy masterpiece about a fishmonger's daughter. Won't you sing for me, please?" 

A pause. 

"Jas. Please. Sing for us, Jas" 

The eyes stay closed, but the bloodied mouth widens horribly above shaking, breakable collarbones. From everything she's inferred, Jaskier used to be vibrant, full, lush, bright. Now he is a naked dry weed at the end of summer, barely alive. Better off dead, perhaps, plucked and woven into an ugly crown or clutched in the sticky fist of a squinting child, blowing away to nothing on milk-sodden breath. 

The lips part, now, eyes bright with tears, and the empty mouth opens. 

Empty. 

Geralt's thumb moves to the cracked lips, speechless, lost. Of course he’s lost, she thinks. What comfort can he give? Things seem clean, at least, closed and scarred over. Mouths, like palms, heal quickly. The mind does not. 

Jaskier exhales, head bowing, lips forming a word-question that will never be spoken: 

"Forgiven?" 

"Only if you stay awake, Jas, I need to get Yennefer, I need to, I need, I need time, Jaskier, give me time, please, stay awake, look, look at the child, hum for her, play your lute on her palm, your fingers are fine, see? You can still claw and caterwaul, look, when have you truly needed words? You're a composer at heart, not a lyricist, your poetry's terrible, Jas. Jaskier! We'll have Yen take us back to the elves, they'll replace your lute. Jas!" 

One last sigh and the taut body goes as limp as a freshly killed rabbit, jackknifing heart and percolating lungs silent as the calm after a storm. The fifty-year-old face looks eighteen again, or fifteen, or ten; cherubic, laugh lines belied by full rosy cheeks. 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Time stretches impossibly until the cheeks are white and the witcher's sore muscles scream, cramping. Ciri's eyes are dry as she pulls his hair hard enough to snap his head back. 

"Pick him up before he's stiff," she commands. "He'd want to be clean. Let's find the kitchen and the morgue. You can stay with him while I warm the water." 

Something happens then, and he registers nothing but the precious burden in his arms and the child's cool hand on his back, guiding him to a place where the fastidious one will be clean again. 

The hand moves back to his hair, tugging more gently now. The space around him is vast, echoing, strewn with bodies. Ciri pushes one off a table and fusses with Jaskier's limbs as Geralt sets him down. 

The girl's power is unstable by now, emotions barely held in check. It blooms from her skin and as she turns, her ragged braid brushes the strange corpse behind her, whispering with magic. 

It rises.


	10. 9

9.

_ And went right back to bed _

The old man sighs and grumbles like a child being forced from sleep to do chores. It takes the stranger a good while to rouse him. Once he is awake, the stranger starts the same way he always does, but something is different. The old man's sharp eyes have spotted something on one of the corpses near him. 

"Oh, Glenn," he sighs. He's shaking. "No, please, Lord, don't let that be Glenn."


	11. 10




_ And the history books forgot about us, and the Bible didn't mention us _

"Glenn" is a crimson pumpkin, collapsed with rot, that was once, Ciri supposes, the extension of a slender, elegant neck. The only reason Geralt picked the old man instead must be his age; Glenn's hands are smooth and young, with strong clever fingers like Jaskier's. How will waking him work?

The strangeman beckons Ciri over. “I’ve no power to heal him. All I do is give them the strength to survive the wounds. He’s got nothing left as can survive. But here you are, fit to burst with too much power. Have you not learned to bleed it off?”

Ciri, who is admittedly a tad lightheaded, stares at him without acknowledging the question at all. 

“Put your hands on his temples, girl, wherever you think they would be.” He rests his own on the well-formed chest, thumbs overlapping, fingers relaxed and branching out like the wingspan of a sleepy bird. He’s missing a few, but his hands don’t seem deformed or incomplete. They just are what they are, tipped with nails as perfect as seashells, as one Ray Bradbury would say. These remaining fingers are making gentle, swelling movements as captivating as a harpist’s. 

The strangeman’s face is loose, lips slightly parted, but somehow the effort he makes is more noticeable than it would have been if he’d scrunched up in concentration. After a moment he goes bloodless, then sways so far that Ciri releases the carnage to steady him. 

When she looks back down, she’s met with golden skin and disheveled waves of glossy black hair. The eyes are like nothing she’s ever seen, set at a feline angle, the lines of them rounder at the inner corners and straightening as they reach for his temples. His soft skin is smooth and uncreased where eyelid and brow bone meet. When the straight lashes sweep up she sees that the eyes themselves are black on black, the rarest of colours, so that she can’t tell where pupils and irises diverge. Suddenly they’re wide open and Glenn is shooting up from the table, gasping.

“I’m coming back for you,” he’s saying, “I promise, Maggie…” 

His words fade and his face falls as he notices his surroundings. Behind him, the old man’s eyes are spilling over. 

Glenn pushes himself off the table. He turns, perhaps searching for an exit, and Ciri watches the quivering line of his back go still. The old man’s shining eyes crinkle above his tremulous mouth and she wishes she could see Glenn light up in recognition. Is he crying too? 

The young man sinks to his knees but rises quickly when his one-legged elder begins struggling to get down from the gurney. Glenn approaches with a blend of deference and familiarity that makes her wonder if they are father and son. He helps the old man down with practiced movements but, once the chore is done, collapses into the waiting arms, sobbing. 

His elder strokes his hair, then kisses it, laughing, all the while gripping the back of Glenn’s neck with a shaking, reverent hand. 


	12. 11

11

_ Not even once _

"So," the strangeman asks casually of the blue-eyed, bent-neck lady, "what's confetti?" 

**Author's Note:**

> I realized last night that pretty much all of the non-canon injuries are ones that I've witnessed in my work as a medical interpreter at a children's hospital (with one exception, which was the case of a patient's grandmother.) Obviously that was intentional medical trauma carried out to prevent worse trauma, but it was violence done to the body and terrible just the same. So this is dedicated to my little warriors. My heart both goes out to you and rejoices in having known you.


End file.
